What is Devastation? There are two answers. In gaming terms, it’s a
team versus team game in the vein of Counterstrike, Tribes, Battlefield
1942, so on and so forth, only it actually has a single player
component (that isn’t a tutorial). In story terms, Devastation takes
place in the not too distant future of corporate tyranny. Instead of
oppressive world governments, the CEOs and board of directors have put a
yolk on the population, with rebel factions fighting back. On the eve
of the twin Matrix films in 2003, this backdrop seems eerily familiar.
It’s a dark future, but the developers simply leave it at that and go with the action route instead. There’s no attempt in the ensuing game
to really flesh the conspiracy part in detail, a la Deus Ex, or through
sarcastic humor, a la Fallout. The result is a game that tries to grab
a huge chunk of the first person shooter pie: team competitive play,
bots from multiplayer matches, full single player campaign. But it comes
up short with only a few morsels.

That might be looking at the whole game a little too bleakly (I did
spend the last week playing a game called Devastation). Devastation
carries a laundry list of features. If it were a resume, it’d be the
resume of the month on Monster.com or Hotjobs. There are thirty-five
modern and futuristic weapons ranging from remote controlled rats (who
act as remote detonators) to your regular 9mm pistol. Sadly, something
had to give in this retinue, and that would be the sounds. After coming
off of Raven Shield (also an Unreal powered first person shooter) and
its diverse arsenal, the effects here are too artificial. There’s not
enough bass or metallic ring to the guns. But Devastation makes up for
it by featuring extensive multiplayer features. You have your regular
bot-included team versus team play in single player; called Territories
in Devastation. CTF, deathmatch and team deathmatch are available for
your human cohorts in a variety of indoor and outdoor maps.

Devastation might look and sound like a Doom or Serious Sam type of game,
but it’s not. It has the pretense of realism through its simulation
mode, which is a good attempt to infuse believability into the world
Digitalo Studios has created. Weapons, for example, don’t reload
automatically. You can throw bottles and objects around you to distract
or kill people. Unfortunately, the level design doesn’t utilize any
simulative concepts because every one of the corporation’s goons is
outfitted with firearms, and more often than not, you’ll have an arsenal
of weapons yourself, which makes it a moot point altogether. This is
something that was used extensively in Splinter Cell, but in Devastation
it is little more than a cosmetic feature that marketing can put on
their checklist. You kick up a trail of pop cans and boxes in your wake
of devastating the landscape. But it does little other than make the
whole thing look cool.

That’s aesthetic criticism though. The real problem with Digitalo’s
creation is the AI: two AIs, in fact, because this game is team versus
team. You have your friendly AI and enemy AI. There are sporadic
moments where the enemy AI appears to work in sync with the game, but it
is mostly because of the scripted setup. Dodging bullets and sniper
fire at night through the shanty towns and wastelands of Devastation’s
San Francisco or Tokyo is exhilarating. But then you realize the
snipers don’t move and you can pick them off easily in concealment.

Because Devastation is a team versus team game, keeping teammates alive
is priority number one because the game abruptly ends if they get killed
– at least in the first half of the game. The friendly AI is
unfortunately over-zealous in eliminating every moving thing within
their patrol radius. Thus, I found it’s best to assign them some
backwater defense post to get them away from the heavy firefights. Once
they are capable of regenerating and resurrecting themselves, your
teammates become a little more useful. So ultimately, for at least 50%
of the game, you’ll have to put two intelligence caps on: one for your
partners and one for you.

Digitalo has worked many of the normal gaming conventions into the
game’s fiction. Respawning, a popular term in first person shooters,
turns out to be a regeneration device that the corporation Grathius uses
to create their clone army. Again, allusions to The Matrix will be
made. Along the way, the rebels capture one of them for themselves and
this explains why you can respawn every time you die. The developers
also try to hide the common mirror-map objectives, where both sides have
to do the same thing similar to Counterstrike or Tribes. Objectives are
broken down to disabling security grids, infiltrating places or
destroying certain objects like regeneration devices. In the single
player missions, a few defensive objectives help give a breath of fresh
air. It is fun trying to hold off a horde of cloned corporation
grunts, but again, this is another case where the scripted portion of the
game is offsetting the deficiencies of the AI and mission design. And
in light of the game they’re trying to design (something like Unreal
Tournament with a story baked in), it’s really cheating. It isn’t
seamless or dynamic when you have to resort to scripted tricks to help
make it work.

No doubt, Digitalo’s trump card is the graphics. Many titles claim to
use the Unreal engine but few can use it to the effect they do. The
character models may not be the sharpest in color but they animate well,
reacting to physical damage viscerally. Point and shoot a shotgun at
the chest of an enemy and you’ll see him or her fly back against the
wall. There is copious use of shadows and real-time lighting. As you
move through shadows, you’ll see the light dance on and off your arm.
So much darkness is used, in fact, that most of the game is shrouded in
a void – annoying for someone who hits the gamma correction at the onset
of every first person shooter. Starting in San Francisco and making its
way to Asia, most of the environments have a neo-urban oriental feel to
it vis-à-vis architecture. All are universally decrepit, which lends
credence to the storyline of a devastated world.

The final version of Devastation is really a mirror of the execution in
the gameplay. It’s hit and miss in some areas. Even with the patches
released so far, the game has a tendency to crash unexpectedly. You
would expect that in multiplayer mode but it happens often in single
player too. It happens even more if you switch from multiplayer to
single player or vice versa. Considering the general stability of the
Unreal engine, it’s hard to imagine what’s going on underneath the
covers, but suffice to say, Devastation could have used more time in the
QA lab.

There are Xbox .ini files strewn all about in the installation folder.
For those who are programmers, you can even locate a few Sourcesafe
tags, which makes the game look like it was rushed out the door.
Devastation has a lot of good ideas in it. The team competitive game is
certainly one that could be made into a compelling game. Digitalo
almost makes one out of it, if only they had trust in themselves to
carry it out to its fullest extent. Before it, games based on this
concept of team versus team had laughingly simplistic single player
components. Tribes and Battlefield 1942 had single player options that
were little more than tutorials for the meat of the game. Devastation
is able to transcend that, albeit rather briefly. With bullets flying
and chaos breaking out in the midst of civilization’s ruins, it’s hard
not to be impressed by Devastation. If it could crash less, have its
gameplay as polished as its graphics, and a few more smarts included
using its premise, it could be on another level altogether. As it
stands now, it fails to devastate the competition.